The Campfire.

Why organisations need spaces where stories are told — and what happens when those spaces disappear.

There's a term I've been using more and more in recent years because nothing else captures it as precisely: the campfire.

By that I don't mean romantic notions of scouts or mountain retreats. I mean something very concrete: a space in an organisation where people meet without an agenda. Where stories get told. Where experience is shared. Where relationship forms — not as a means to an end, but as a value in itself.

Such spaces have disappeared in most organisations. And that isn't harmless.

What has happened anthropologically

Humans are campfire creatures. Over tens of thousands of years, our most important learning processes, identity formation, the transmission of knowledge were bound to a very similar context: small groups sitting in the evening, one telling. The rest listening.

Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, found in a famous study of the !Kung of the Kalahari: during the day, 81% of conversations were about economic topics — hunting, gathering, tools. In the evening at the fire, 81% were about something else: stories. Anecdotes about other people. Relationships. Values. Who was there, what happened, what it meant.

Wiessner's thesis is simple and far-reaching: the daytime conversation solves today's problems. The campfire conversation builds the culture that lets us act tomorrow.

What has happened in modern organisations

In most companies I work with, there is no campfire anymore. The official spaces are all task-oriented: stand-ups, reviews, sprints, steerings, town halls.

What used to exist informally — the chat over coffee, lunch together, a beer after work, the brief exchange in the corridor — has been largely displaced by a mix of three factors:

First: efficiency thinking. In many cultures, breaks have been redefined as "lost time." Whoever pauses isn't working. What isn't working creates no value. That was the logic.

Second: hybrid work. Since Covid, a substantial share of office workers works partly remotely. That has advantages — and an underestimated downside: random, unplanned encounters disappear almost entirely. What remains are scheduled calls. Scheduled calls are not campfires.

Third: tool acceleration. Slack, Teams and the like create the feeling of constant connection without producing actual relationship. You know what others do. You don't know who they are.

What is being lost

When a team no longer has a campfire, something unspectacular disappears first: shared experience. People know less about each other. The stories that used to implicitly transport values — "do you remember when we..." — vanish.

That seems trivial. It isn't.

An organisation without shared stories loses its immunological memory. It no longer knows why it does what it does. It no longer knows where it draws its identity from. It becomes interchangeable — even in the eyes of its own employees.

A study from MIT Sloan on retention in large companies found an often-overlooked result: the strongest predictor of staying wasn't salary, wasn't career prospects, wasn't leadership quality alone. It was whether employees felt they "belonged to a story."

Stories don't form in quarterly reports. They form at the campfire.

What centrifugal forces do to teams

Here's the observation that has occupied me most in recent months: in nearly every organisation, systemic forces drive people apart from each other.

Time pressure. Tooling that makes individuals more efficient but relationship harder. Hybrid models that fragment presence. Reorgs that sever relationships. AI tools taking over more and more tasks that used to be occasions for collaboration.

These forces aren't malicious. But they are centrifugal — they push outward, away from the centre. And they work reliably.

If a team has no centripetal counter-movement — something that pulls people back toward the middle — it loses its substance after a few months. Not spectacularly. Slowly. Until someone eventually says: "We're not a team anymore. We're a group of individuals who happen to share the same Slack workspace."

What this means in practice

A campfire in a modern organisation isn't a literal fire. It is a recurring space with three properties:

First: no agenda. The moment there's an official purpose, the moment "something must be achieved," the dynamic shifts. Campfires need purposelessness to work.

Second: enough time. Real stories need time. They don't fit in fifteen minutes. Whoever builds campfires must keep time free for it — and do so against the resistance of their own efficiency logic.

Third: permission for the unsharp. At the campfire, communication isn't efficient. There are tangents. There is laughter. Something arises that you can't minute afterwards.

In my consulting work, I see leaders who initially struggle to bear this. They want outcomes. They want results per hour. They want every investment to be measurable.

But campfires are not measured in outputs. They are measured in what they make possible — over months and years.

A very practical question

When I work with leadership teams, I often ask one very simple question: "Where does your team actually meet without anything having to be 'worked through'?"

If the honest answer is "nowhere" — that's one of the more important levers for the months ahead. Not because it would be nice. Because centrifugal forces are reliable — and only a counter-movement balances them.

You often recognise a good team by whether it has a campfire. A place where it actually meets itself, regularly.

The fire doesn't burn by itself. Someone has to light it.

That, too, is leadership.